


“i was just thinking about you.”

by clickingkeyboards



Series: one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [75]
Category: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Genre: Christmas, Crushes, F/M, Fluff, Pre-Relationship, friends - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:21:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25267528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards
Summary: On their still-snowy Boxing Day at Cambridge, Hazel and Alexander share a quiet moment in the gardens.Canon EraWritten for the seventy-fifth prompt in the '100 ways to say "I love you"' prompt list by p0ck3tf0x on Tumblr.
Relationships: Alexander Arcady/Hazel Wong, Daisy Wells & Hazel Wong
Series: one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [75]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1533164
Comments: 2
Kudos: 29





	“i was just thinking about you.”

On the day after our wonderful fairytale Christmas, Cambridge became subdued. The streets were blanketed with a thick layer of snow that seemed to muffle everything, and everybody was sleepy from eating such enormous amounts the day before. For what was apparently the first time since Alexander met him, George slept until almost noon. When he joined us for a picnic lunch accompanied by numb fingertips and absolutely no cold cuts of meat, under a tree that had shielded the grass beneath its branches from snowfall, he looked less than perfect.

“I utterly blame the fact that we had to walk for an hour yesterday just to find a Mandir,” he complained to us in between bites of cucumber sandwiches, as blissfully and Englishly unaware of the cold as Daisy, while Alexander and I tucked our frozen hands between our knees and pulled woollen hats down over our ears.

“You’re the one who chose to go and find one,” Daisy replied, brushing her waves of golden hair back over her shoulder and biting into a fish paste sandwich.

Frankly raising his eyebrows at her, he said, “You Christians don’t know how good you have it; there’s a church on every corner! It’s bunkum.”

“Is it like that in India, only with Mandirs?” I asked him, rather muffled around a mouthful of muffin.

“I’ve never been to India, Hazel.” He barely stopped for breath before leaning over and stealing a muffin from the box in front of me, and it was a pleasant shock to be reminded that I know someone who likes food as much as I do. “Harold has, but he was too small to remember anything. Other than catching scarlet fever and giving everyone in my family a mild heart attack.”

“That happened to Bertie when he was little, too. But not… scarlet fever. Measles. Mrs Doherty and Chapman quarantined him in his room. Then he got mumps when he was eight. Bertie was sick  _ all the time  _ when we were little. Not me, though. I was a perfect baby.”

Before I could help myself, I muttered, “What happened?”

Alexander spluttered, putting a hand over his mouth to stop himself spitting lemonade. George, much less polite, started cackling. Daisy was pink in the face, her mouth pressed into a very straight line as she tried not to laugh. “Hazel!” she said eventually, as tight and proper as possible given her giggle fit. “That’s  _ rude _ !”

“So are you!”

This sent us up in fits of laughter again, George and Alexander trying desperately to recover themselves only to make eye contact and start laughing once more. Daisy and I kept looking at each other and couldn’t stop laughing, until all four of us were hot in the face and mildly bedraggled.

“Right,” Daisy began with some recovered dignity, tucking a strand of golden hair behind her ear, “what are we going to spend the rest of the day doing?”

“That reminds me,” George said, perfectly put-together despite our five minutes of losing it, breathing deeply, and losing it yet again, “do either of you know where my brother is? It’s rather funny, in my opinion.”

Alexander picked up the narrative, purposefully looking away from George’s eyes so they wouldn’t set each other off again. “We couldn’t find him this morning and no one had a damn clue where he was, but all the other students had those peculiar looks of ‘you’d better not ask’. We were about to insist that someone tell us where they thought he was, and then I realised and I went, ‘Ohhhhh!’ and, according to George, my eyes went very wide.”

“They  _ did _ !”

“At least I realised where he was before you!”

“What did you realise?” I asked, my tongue feeling quite heavy in my mouth as I tried not to look at Alexander. Daisy reached over and rudely pinched my shoulder, and I playfully glared right back.

Looking at Daisy with pointedly raised eyebrows, George said, “In  _ your brother’s _ rooms.”

I chuckled awkwardly, still a little blushy at the idea of Bertie having a  _ boyfriend _ . Alexander glanced at me, despite me trying not to catch his eye, and then he started laughing as loud as anything, and then George went too, and Daisy was surrounded by three decidedly un-British people spluttering with breathing hard, until she fell about laughing too.

* * *

Later on in the afternoon, George and Harold were crowding around a phone in St. John’s to call their parents, and Daisy and Bertie were finally having some family time alone in Bertie’s room. This left me wandering about Cambridge, thrillingly alone, wondering what Alexander was doing.

When I walked into the gardens behind Maudlin, Alexander was suddenly startlingly real, not just a smiling picture in my head. “Alexander, hello!” I called out before I could stop myself, before pressing a very chilly hand over my half-open mouth.

“Hazel!” he greeted, ever happy to see me in a strictly friendly way. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Oh?” I replied quite wanly, feeling my face go red as I wondered  _ what _ he was thinking about me. Probably not the things I wanted. “What about me?”

He shrugged, and I slowly walked over to stand beside him. “If you could go home for the holidays, would you?”

“I don’t know. Daisy is lovely and I love spending time with her, and my parents argue sometimes, but being in Hong Kong with my family would outweigh it all,” I told him honestly, looking up at him. His cheeks were pink from the cold, and his nose is rather pink too. Holding himself against the cold, he pointedly looked straight ahead, gloved hands tucked into his pockets and blue eyes bright against the white background surrounding us. “Would you go home to America for the holidays?”

Running a hand back through his golden hair, which almost sparkled, he told me, “I wouldn’t if it killed me.”

“Why?”

He shrugged again. “It’s all about the family business when I go back home. I just want to detect, with George, more than anything. My father was… fine with it at first, but when I expressed serious interest in being a detective, he  _ hated  _ it. When I told him, last Christmas, he went so red and got so furious I thought he was going to burst.” As he spoke, he closed his eyes, and it was as if he was back in America, being shouted at by his father.

“How awful,” I breathed, because it sounded hideous, and it made me feel bitter in my very core. My father has shouted at me, and so loud it could shake down our compound, but he has not once disparaged my ambitions, only questioned the fierce and lovely person that I share them with. 

Seemingly resigned to it, Alexander shook his head. “It’s all about the family business. My father has practically already booked the tickets for the ship back when I’m done at Weston. I have to take over the family business, I have no  _ choice _ . But I’d rather fake my own death than do it.”

“Why?” I asked him, and I suppose that I don’t  _ understand _ . I’ve always been my dad’s clever daughter, and he’s always impressed on me the importance of a good education, but there have never been whispers of me taking over the business. There are no boys to do it. “My father thinks I should do whatever I like; it’s the  _ who  _ I choose to do it with that bothers him.”

I raised my eyebrows at him, trying to communicate everything about Daisy in one expression, and his laugh made him light up with brilliance in a way that had me hot from head to toe. The tone soon settled back to what it was, and he kicked at the snow on the ground, exposing the startling green of the grass underneath. “The mines, the investments, the meetings… it all seems dull and done to death, and Massachusetts is boring. It’s nothing like England. God, I’m jealous of George. He  _ lives  _ here, in this brilliant country. The history is hideous but there’s so  _ much  _ of it. George tells me about brilliant people who aren’t British and white who made amazing changes to this country, and he tells me the history of all the beautiful buildings and about wicked kings and clever queens and scandals in the royal family.” He gestured around at the beautiful old buildings around us, and I understand. In our compound in Hong Kong, nothing is older than my grandfather. Alexander continues to talk, as if he has burst and is finally spilling all of the horrid thoughts inside his head. “Nothing is older than my grandfather in America, and every metaphorical bloody corner is padded. You can learn the hard way here, it’s actually  _ possible  _ to get in trouble and do the wrong thing. The weather is sharp and the streets are old and cobbled and narrow, and… England is a country where books are made, and my god do I want to be in one. But instead I’m stuck in a cycle of coal mines and… I want to get out.”

I didn’t know how to advise him. It seemed a vicious and sour cycle and I had no idea how one would even begin to escape. So instead I said, “Tell me about history.”

“British or American?”

“Both. Either. I don’t mind.”

“Did you know that, before she was executed, Katherine Howard ran down the halls of the palace, begging for mercy?”

I pulled a face, and it made him laugh, so it must have been funny. “That’s not nice.”

“No, it isn’t.”

I moved to stand a little closer to him, and he didn’t move away. I felt as if I was a match moving closer and closer to the striking paper, ready to burst alight. “Tell me something happy. Something funny.”

“Andrew Jackson, he was a president, had a bird that knew how to swear,” he explained, making the universal motion for a parrot opening and closing its beak with one gloved hand. “They removed it from his funeral because it was swearing too much.”

Surprised by the bluntness, I snorted with laughter. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright. I like your laugh. It’s… happy. I have another silly fact.  _ Bertie _ would appreciate it.” This was accompanied by a meaningful raise of his eyebrows. “One king, James the First, was so  _ obsessed  _ with his lover that he had a passage linking his bedchamber with his lover’s.”

I paused, trying to think of how Bertie could possibly find that interesting. “Does Bertie have a particular interest in the royal family that I am aware of?” I asked, and it made Alexander chuckle silently, with shaking shoulders.

“Said lover was called George Villiers.”

That did make us both laugh, and we laughed doubled over until we lost our breath and straightened up again, chests heaving in breathless tandem.

“Your hands are quite red, Hazel,” he observed once we were some semblance of calm, and he tugged on the fingers of his lovely leather gloves. “Mine are quite warm, would you like to borrow my gloves?”

I thought of how my father would be horrified if he saw this, how Jie-Jie would giggle and Ah Mah would tut. In my mind’s eye, I saw Beanie giggling and Kitty gasping and Lavinia rolling her eyes, George raising his eyebrows and Daisy laughing and hugging me and sighing at my crush and  _ knowing _ .

The idea of Daisy’s inevitable reaction to me telling her of this moment outweighed it all, and so I said, “Thank you,” quite breathless for another reason, and took his gloves. They were still warm from his hands when I pulled them on, and he tucked his hands into the pockets of his coat and nudged me with his elbow.

“Look!” Snow is falling again!”

He didn’t shift away again.

We stood abreast, new snow falling over us and our arms pressed together, and neither of us said a word. 


End file.
